Two days ago, the perfect midpoint of winter; next week, a holiday named for the theoretical patron saint of lovers.
Yesterday, a gift of love from the cosmos.
It’s been odd enough awakening, so many bitterly cold mornings this season, to a world wrapped in fog. Fog usually requires a bit more ambient warmth than we have had in the dawn hours this winter. Yesterday, however, took the strangeness to new and literal — and spectacularly beautiful — heights, in the form of a midwinter’s rainbow.
Yesterday’s forecast predicted snow, but all we got were five minutes of clattering sleet. The clouds moved out too soon, the air warmed too fast; the only real snow that fell near here yesterday was at far higher altitudes than ours. And still, the spirits managed to bestow a blessing more common to this winter’s opposite.
Yes, that is a real rainbow. It showed itself in full arc across the northeastern sky, but Wings caught the extreme north end in the moments when it glowed with electric intensity.
The arc of shimmering colored ice crystals was not, however, the only rainbow yesterday. Our world itself, robed still in what remains of its snowy blanket, the white of the full spectrum of light combined, shone with disparate shades. Pale clouds parted to reveal an indigo sky; the evergreens held their forested hues with pride; the weeping willows glowed like molten gold; and the red willows beyond seemed more than their ordinary brick color, a positively crimson profusion above the surface of the snow.
It was, of course, only a momentary gift: Such conditions change too rapidly to admit such an anomaly for any length of time. But I like to think, too, that brevity was elemental to the nature of the blessing itself, a reminder, even on the gloomiest of days, to look up — and a reminder, too, that wonders appear occasionally to reassure us that even life’s hard harsh midwinter, there is a beauty of purpose to it.
Today is grayer still, the sun only a wan suggestion behind long thin trailing bands of cloud. If the forecast holds, the snow will arrive tonight, instead — and continue through the next two days, thence to plunge us into the bitter cold that more usually follows a winter storm here. Given our schedule, it will make this a hard week.
Good fortune, then, that the week began with a rainbow — more accurately for yesterday, a snowbow? — in all the colors of the earth’s heart.
~ Aji
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